Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Baltimore Sun's 10 Year Anniversary Series: Dave Dickerson

The Baltimore Sun's "Where Are They Now?" celebration of the 2002 National Championship team rolls on with a profile of Dave Dickerson (1985-89), who I knew was an assistant coach on that team, but never realized he was also a player for Lefty Driesell and Bob Wade. After several years as the head coach at Tulane, Dickerson is now an assistant coach at Ohio State, where he will be coaching in the Sweet 16 next weekend. Here's an excerpt about becoming the head coach at Tulane in 2005; go read the whole story:

Ironically, the first year Maryland didn't make the tournament after Dickerson's return to his alma mater, he got his first head coaching job at Tulane. A program that had once been shut down because of point-shaving and later had some success under Perry Clark, Dickerson’s predecessor, the former Maryland assistant thought the opportunity in New Orleans was promising.

Until Aug. 29, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Big Easy.

"It was a tough job when I took it on a lot of fronts," Dickerson recalled recently. "Three years before that there was some talk within the university of going Division III. On the heels of that, there was a lot of skepticism about Tulane basketball and Tulane athletics. Then Katrina hits, which made it an almost impossible job."

Dickerson and his team – not to mention his wife Laurette and then 4-year-son David III – were displaced to College Station, Texas. The team went to school, practiced and played on the campus of Texas A&M.

"Within my first six months of a job, which is a crucial time in a job, we had no campus," he said. "We couldn’t bring recruits in on an official visit before the first signing day. The recruiting class that we were working on and had put a lot of effort into just washed away – literally."